Monday, July 06, 2015

The Faith and The Drink

By
Michael P. Foley

A
dozen years ago, Rev. Jim West published Drinking
With Luther and Calvin
to show howthe
Reformers’ view of alcohol was far different from what came to
dominate in many American Protestant churches following the
Temperance Movement.
West’s book was a fitting sequel of sorts to Kenneth Gentry’s
2000 God Gave Wine:
What the Bible Says About Alcohol,
and it also set the stage for Brad Whittington’s 2013 What
Would Jesus Drink?

No
list of comparable publications exists within the Catholic world;
apparently, there is little doubt about Catholicism’s attitude
regarding the Drink. The Catechism of the Catholic Church does not
condemn fermented or distilled beverages, only their abuse by way of
excess (CCC 2290). Indeed, one of the Church’s seven sacraments
necessitates alcohol. The Eucharist is the body, blood, soul, and
divinity of Jesus Christ, but it must start out as bread and wine.

But
aside from this sacramental requirement and a few aging Irish
stereotypes, is there really a strong link between Catholicism and
alcohol, and if so, why? And what does that mean for us today? Such
are the questions animating this essay. We begin with a survey of the
historic impact that Catholicism has had on the production and
development of alcohol.

A
Wet History

Although
the purpose of the Catholic Church is to bring souls to Heaven, she
has also made life here on earth more pleasant in a number of ways.
Consider the following:

Wine
predates Christianity by centuries, but it was monks who largely
preserved viniculture during the Middle Ages. Religious orders such
as the Benedictines and (later) Jesuits became expert winemakers;
many only quit because their lands in Europe were confiscated by the
modern State in the name of secularization.

Pressed
by the duty to celebrate the Eucharist, Catholic missionaries brought
their knowledge of vine-growing with them to the New World. Wine
grapes were first introduced to California by Blessed Junipero Serra
and his Franciscan brethren, and the rebirth of the California wine
industry after Prohibition was thanks in large part to a chemistry
teacher and LaSalle Christian Brother named Brother Timothy. There
are similar stories about the origins of vineyards in Argentina and
Australia. The Jesuits,
for instance, founded the oldest winery in South Australia’s Clare
Valley when they purchased 100 acres of land in 1851 and planted a
vineyard to make sacramental wine. Named Sevenhill Cellars after the
seven hills of Rome, the operation is still supervised by a Jesuit
with the title of Winemaker and produces “notably sturdy Cabernet
Sauvignons of high colour, huge flavor and long life.”

Pious
men not only preserved and promulgated oenology; they also advanced
it. The méthode
champenoise was
invented by a Benedictine monk whose name now adorns one of the
world’s finest champagnes: Dom Pérignon. According to the story,
when he sampled his first batch, Perignon cried out to his fellow
monks: “Brothers, come quickly. I am drinking stars!” Monks and
priests even found new uses for the grape. The Jesuits, for instance,
are credited with improving the process for making grappa in Italy
and pisco in South America (both of which are grape brandies).

Similarly,
although beer may have been invented by the ancient Egyptians, it was
perfected by the medieval monasteries that gave us modern brewing as
we know it: one saint (Arnold of Soissons) has even been credited
with inventing the filtration process. To this day, the world’s
finest beer is made within the cloister—specifically, within the
cloister of a Trappist monastery. Other orders, such as Carmelites
and the Paulaner monks, have contributed very fine beers as well.

Equally
impressive is the Catholic contribution to distilled spirits. Whiskey
was invented by Irish monks, who probably shared their knowledge with
the Scots during their missions. Chartreuse, the world’s most
magical liqueur, was perfected by Carthusian monks and is still made
by them. Bénédictine D.O.M. was invented by Dom Bernardo Vincelli
to “fortify and restore weary monks.” Frangelico, which today
comes in a brown bottle shaped like a monk, was invented by a hermit
of that name during his solitude by experimenting with various nuts,
herbs and berries he had gathered. Rompope, a kind of Mexican eggnog,
was invented by nuns in Mexico when it was still a Spanish colony.
Maraska liqueur was
invented by Dominican apothecaries in the early sixteenth century.

A
Threefold Cause?

Given
that there are indeed historic ties between the Catholic Faith and
alcohol, the next relevant question is why? Why would a religion
dedicated to otherworldly bliss get involved with such an earthly
(and potentially immoral) delight?

There
are, in my opinion, three reasons. First, the economic and social
conditions were right for it. Medieval monastic communities possessed
all of the qualities necessary for the production of beverages such
as wine and beer. They had vast tracts of land for planting grapes or
hops, and they had an economic incentive to produce goods that could
earn income for their order. Moreover, a monastery has great
institutional stability with a long, inter-generational memory and a
respect for tradition; it has a facility for teamwork and for
collaboration; and it has a commitment to excellence in all that it
does. The last point is especially important:
the Benedictine motto Ora
et Labora (Work
and Pray) encourages the believer to see all of his work as a prayer
to God. When you apply this principle to beer, the results are
outstanding.

Second,
to promote bodily health. Because we live in an age where we are told
to drink eight glasses of water a day and to be careful about the
health effects of too much alcohol, it is easy to forget that for
most of human history, clean water was something of a rarity. Water
sources often carried dangerous pathogens, and so as a remedy, small
amounts of alcohol would be mixed with water to kill the germs
therein. Roman soldiers were given a daily allowance of wine, not for
them to get drunk, but so that they could purify whatever water they
found on campaign.

During
the Middle Ages, “small beer” was beer low in alcohol that was
consumed by women, children, and manual laborers. (Again, it
contained just enough alcohol to kill bacteria but not enough to make
you tipsy.) The bishop-saints Arnulf of Metz and Arnold of Soissons
are both credited with saving their flock from the plague because
they admonished them to drink beer instead of water.

Alcohol
also served as a medicine. In the New Testament, St. Paul admonishes
St. Timothy to drink wine for his stomach problems (1 Tim. 5:23).
Centuries later, distilled spirits such as whiskey would be developed
by monks because of their medical use. The
first written mention of whisky, which is Gaelic for “water of
life,” is as a cure for “paralysis of the tongue.” Apparently
it works, too, for no Irishman since has been accused of being
tongue-tied.

The author, plying his avocational trade

Other
spirits, such as chartreuse, were produced as a vegetable elixir to
aid one’s health. The original version by the Carthusian order had
a high proof of 138 (69% alcohol). When the monks discovered that
their product was being used recreationally, they lowered the proof
to 110, thereby giving us green chartreuse as we now know it.
Chartreuse continues to be used medicinally, starting with the
Carthusians themselves, who take a tablespoon of it instead of cough
medicine when they catch a cold.

Even
beer was used as a vitamin supplement. Beer’s nickname in the
Middle Ages was “liquid bread” because of its nutritional value.
The beer known as doppelbock, which is rich in carbohydrates,
calories and vitamins, was
invented specifically for the season of Lent to compensate for the
fast by the Paulaner monks in Munich. It is said that they gave up
all food during this penitential season and lived entirely on their
beer. Named Salvator after our Savior, Paulaner doppelbock is still
produced today.

Third
and most importantly, alcohol is “sacramental” in both senses of
the word. As we already noted, wine is the matter for one of the
seven canonical sacraments. With his customary mastery, St. Thomas
Aquinas offers several compelling reasons why wine, along with bread,
was most likely chosen by the Son of God to become the Eucharist.
Since this sacrament “avails for the defense of soul and body” (I
Cor. 11:20), we may think of Christ’s body in the species of bread
offered for the health of the body, and Christ’s blood in the
species of wine offered for the health of the soul, since according
to Leviticus 17:14, “The life of all flesh is in the blood.”i

Further,
like bread, wine is an apt symbol of the Church and of the effect of
the Eucharist on the Church as a whole, for just “as bread is
composed of many grains, and wine flows from many grapes,” “We
being many are [made] one body” (see I Cor. 10:17).

Finally,
“wine from the grape is
more in keeping with the effect of this sacrament, which is
spiritual; because it is written (Ps. 103:15): ‘That wine may cheer
the heart of man.’” In other words, the Eucharist cheers the soul
of man like wine cheers his heart. Let us reflect on this reason for
a moment. Why is wine associated with cheer more than bread? Is it
not because it contains alcohol, which in moderation raises man’s
spirit, rendering it more cheerful? According to Aquinas, then, wine
was in part chosen to be the matter of the sacrament precisely
because of its inebriating effect, not despite it.

Second,
wine—along with other forms of alcohol—are loosely “sacramental”
insofar as they act as “divine signs” (sacramenta)
reminding us of the goodness of God’s creation and His providential
care over us. As St. Arnulf of Metz put it: “from man’s sweat and
God’s love, beer came into the world.” Or consider the following
statement made by the monks from the Monastero San Benedetto in
Norcia, Italy, a Benedictine community that celebrates the
traditional liturgy and that recently began to produce its own beer:

[We] have sought to share with
the world a product which came about in the very heart of the
monastic life, one which reminds us of the goodness of creation and
the potential that it contains…. The project of the monastic
brewery was conceived with the hope of sharing with others the joy
arising from the labor of our own hands, so that in all things the
Lord and Creator of all may be sanctified.

Such
a positive attitude is even endorsed by the formal worship of the
Church. Note the italicized sections of the following blessings,
taken from the Roman Ritual:

Lord, bless this creature beer,
which by your kindness
and power has been
produced from kernels of grain, and let it be a healthful drink for
mankind. Grant that whoever drinks it with
thanksgiving to your holy name
may find it a help in body and in soul. (Blessing of Beer)

Lord, Jesus Christ, Son of the
living God, who in Cana of Galilee changed water into wine, be
pleased to bless and to hallow this creature, wine, which
you have given as refreshment for your servants.
And grant that whenever it is taken as drink or poured into wounds it
will be accompanied by an outpouring of grace from on high. (Blessing
of Wine for the Sick).

God, who in creating the world
brought forth for
mankind bread as food and wine as drink, bread to nourish the body
and wine to cheer the heart;
who conferred on blessed John, your beloved disciple, such great
favor that not only did he himself escape the poisoned potion but
could restore life by your power to others who were dead from poison;
grant to all who drink this wine spiritual gladness and everlasting
life. (Blessing of Wine on the Feast of St. John the Evangelist).

Application

At
this point we are in a position to ask what all of this means for our
own use of alcohol in today’s day and age, when many of the
historic reasons for a Catholic endorsement of the bottle may no
longer apply. Thanks to modern water treatment plants, safe, clean
water in our society is plentiful; and the majority of today’s
alcohol manufacturers are secular concerns that are driven by profit
rather than prayer, even when they tout a “monastic” product such
as Bénédictine D.O.M. or an “abbey ale.” Finally, the modern
pharmaceutical industry offers a dazzling array of medicinal
solutions to man’s ailments.

Despite
these important developments, however, alcohol retains its
sacramental value as a divine sign of God’s love for us for which
thanksgiving and moderation are the appropriate answer: In
Chesterton’s immortal words, “We should give thanks to God for
beer and burgundy by not drinking too much of them.” A recognition
of the goodness of God’s physical creation in the form of alcohol
produces wonder and gratitude, and this cheerful gratitude,
especially in fellowship with others, is a hallmark of an
authentically Catholic culture.

Think
of the Mediterranean countries where food and wine (and an aperitivo
and digestivo thrown in for good measure) are not occasions for abuse
but for drawing closer to family and friends. To this day, when you
see a drunk in the streets of Italy, it is usually an American or
north German tourist. The old American Protestant culture, especially
in some parts of the South, produced a schizophrenic attitude towards
alcohol according to which you were either a teetotaler or a
dipsomaniac. Catholic cultures, on the other hand, produced
well-balanced gourmands even on the level of the peasantry. Hence the
poem penned by Hillaire Belloc:

It
is important, then, to distinguish between the moderate use of
alcohol and drunkenness, which is potentially not only a mortal sin
but the occasion of additional falls from grace. St. Ephrem
the Syrian, for instance, composed an impassioned hymn about Noah’s
inebriation in which he warns chaste maidens
about the power of wine to take away their virtue.

Beware of Wine in that it
disgraced Noah the precious;

He that had conquered the Deluge
of water was himself conquered by a handful of wine;

The Flood that was outside him
did not overcome him, but the wine that was within him in silence did
steal.

If wine disgraced and cast down
Noah, the head of families and tongues, forsooth, O lonely one, how
it will conquer thee!

Understandably
then, while the Bible makes generally favorable mention of wine and
strong drink, it consistently condemns drunkenness. And the same is
true for Church teaching.

Interestingly,
many of the saints drank very little alcohol while some drank none.
As St. Thomas Aquinas explains, for most people, in order to gain the
wisdom that is sufficient for salvation, it is only necessary to
abstain from the immoderate use of wine. But for certain
persons, he continues,
“it is requisite… that
they abstain altogether from wine,” depending on the circumstances.

Usually,
when a saintly soul abstains from alcohol, it is as a form of penance
or mortification. Such self-denial, it should be noted, is an
implicit affirmation
of the goodness of alcohol. In a delightful essay called “Fish on
Friday,” Fr. Leonard Feeney explains that weekly abstinence from
flesh meat pays an “enormous compliment” to meat “by
considering its absence from our table to be a hardship.” He
continues: “One does not offer God by way of penance what one
thinks is bad but what one thinks is good. And nobody really
understands how good meat is until he tries going without it one day
a week.”ii

This
logic applies to other ascetical acts as well: clergy and religious,
for example, take vows of celibacy not because sexual intimacy and
family are evils to be avoided but because they are goods to be
missed for the sake of a higher calling. And the same logic applies
to abstinence from strong drink. In Mormon teaching, alcohol and
caffeine are believed to be harmful to the body, which is why God
allegedly gave “a law of health” to Joseph Smith in 1833
forbidding their use. But for the Catholic, alcohol is a medicine
that gladdens the heart of man. While
the Mormon believer abstains from alcohol because it is bad, the
Catholic ascetic abstains from alcohol because it is good.

Bad
Teetotaling

One
of the interesting implications of this line of thought is that just
as there can be bad forms of drinking, there can also be bad forms of
abstinence. St. John Chrysostom had to deal with a heretical group
which held that alcohol was evil. The great Greek Father’s response
was crystal clear: in denying the goodness of wine, you are calling
St. Paul and the Holy Spirit liars, and therefore you should receive
a sound thrashing:

In writing to Timothy, [Paul] bid
him take refuge in the
healing virtue of wine-drinking.
Not that to drink wine is shameful. God forbid! For such precepts
belong to heretics....

And should you hear any one in
the public thoroughfare, or in the midst of the forum, blaspheming
God [by saying that wine is evil], go up to him and rebuke
him;
and should it be necessary to
inflict
blows, spare not to do so. Smite him on the face; strike his mouth;
sanctify your hand with the blow,
and if any should
accuse you, and drag you to the place of justice, follow them
thither; and when the judge on the bench calls you to account, say
boldly that the man blasphemed the King of angels! For if it be
necessary to punish those who blaspheme an earthly king, much more so
those who insult God.iii

That’s
right: sanctify your knuckles on anyone who tells you not to drink
wine! Abstinence may be a moral obligation for some (e.g.,
alcoholics), but for others it can be a sin. If abstinence were to
“molest nature grievously,” St.
Thomas Aquinas writes, it
“would not be free from sin.”iv
The same is true if abstinence is a masked form of pride or a
Manichean denial of the goodness of carnal existence and its
potential to act as a conduit of heavenly grace. Jesus
commended John the Baptist’s asceticism because he was doing so in
anticipation of the Messiah; one must be careful not to abstain in
priggish denial of the Messiah’s gifts to mankind.

Michael
P. Foley, an associate professor at Baylor University, is the author
of the recently published Drinking
With the Saints: The Sinner’s Guide to a Holy Happy Hour
(Regnery, 2015). The present essay, "The Faith and The Drink," was first published in The Latin Mass: The Journal of Catholic Culture and Tradition, Vol. 24, No. 2 (Summer 2015), pp.38-41, and is reproduced here by kind permission of the publisher; and is permanently archived at Scripture and Catholic Tradition.

4 comments:

To this day, when you see a drunk in the streets of Italy, it is usually an American or north German tourist.

Amen.

ABS and The Bride were in this lil' Trattoria in Venice (Tratttoria Ca'D'Oro) where various age groups arrived to eat meatballs, sing songs, and drink this FANTASTIC earthy wine, Raboso, an ancient Italian red still made in the Piave Region where it has been continuously made in the same fashion since the Roman Empire.

WHAT A WINE, It is intense, a deep jammy red color, and ABS could taste the dirt in it and the best quality about it is the, relatively, low alcohol content. This is a wine for the man on vacation with his beautiful Bride.

As we sat there sipping this wine and eating meatballs, about 6-8 old men came in and ordered fried meatballs and began talking and laughing as the Barkeep poured them a pitcher of Raboso and the men went on conversing etc when, suddenly, one of them began to sing and the others joined in.

What a great blessing to have been there at that moment...

Italians do NOT get drunk in public; they are well dressed, very friendly, solicitous, kind, and warm. We felt safer late at night wailing the streets of Rome, Venice and Florence whereas we would not have felt as safe in an American city.

Venice: Over the more than 400 bridges, and around hundreds of corners, one will wander lost into some fantastic square where some beautiful church stands patiently waiting to be explored or where some trattoria or cafe stands ready to serve you pastry or or wine or where some incredibly voluptuous alley inveiglingly lifts a stone skirt up over her bewitching bridge, flashing a bit of sensuous canal, skillfully seducing the virgin visitor.

Venice is a beautiful living exotic and sultry woman far more than it is a city; Venice is alive and she breathes and moves.

And the bridges alone there, say nothing about the churches and art inside. Lord have mercy.

Where in America can one see such romantic architecture as, say, the Bridge of Sighs, Ponte dei Sospiri

To speak it is to sing.

And that is just scratching the surface of Venice...Don't even get me started on Rome :)

ABS would love to tour Italy with you, share some great wine and food and art and architecture and to hear what you have to say about its history etc.

Imagine just standing before the Roman Fourm, looking down into all of that history...

ABS would almost pay your way there just to hear what you had to say about Rome and its history. If there is a better city on earth to visit, ABS has;t heard of it.

O, and when he wins the lottery, ABS will prolly buy a condo/villa in the Alban Hills because it has the best porchetta on the planet and it is a short, cheap, bus trip into Rome from there...